BuddyPress

The release candidate version of BuddyPress 1.2 is now ready for download and testing (svn link). Thank you to those who have contributed so far, we’ve closed over 125 tickets since we released the beta last week.

We’re almost there, but we still need your help with this final testing phase. We’re looking for testers on both standard WordPress and WordPress MU version 2.9.1 and above. You can also test the release candidate without installing on our testing community site.

As before you can find a list of known issues and a place to post bugs via the BuddyPress Trac installation.

There are also instructions for upgrading test installations from previous versions of BuddyPress on the codex.

Please do not post bugs in the comments as they may be missed.

Update: If you’re upgrading from 1.2 beta then you can simply overwrite your existing BuddyPress files, you do not need to follow the official upgrade instructions.

As we start to prepare BuddyPress 1.2 there will be a fury of activity both in the support forums and in the development trac. To help keep up with these changes and make it easier for you to get involved, we’ve followed the success of the WordPress devs and started our own development blog. We’ll be using it to talk about roadmaps, features, APIs, future enhancements, and the general technical details that maybe aren’t fitting for support forums or official announcements.

Because blogging and commenting back and forth sometimes aren’t enough to get the point across, we’ve also setup dedicated time each week to have a developers discussion in #buddypress-dev on Freenode on IRC. We’ll be using the development blog to set each weeks’ agenda and will be following a similar format to the WordPress dev chat, so if you’re familiar with that setup you should feel right at home.

Join in to #buddypress-dev on Wednesdays at 19:00 UTC (currently 7pm GMT, 2pm EST, 11am PST) and check out http://bpdevel.wordpress.com to come chat with us and help shape the future of BuddyPress!

I’d like to congratulate John James Jacoby (aka jjj) for doubling the size of the core development team and gaining commit access to the project!

BuddyPress is growing, and at a pace that just one core developer cannot possibly keep up with. I’ve been looking to expand the size of the core development team for a while now and I’m excited to be able to announce the first stop along that road.

If you’re a regular in the forums or trac you’ll already know who John is. He has been an unrelenting force for some time with quick responses to questions and quality core patches.

John will be helping with bug fixing to begin with, then looking to take on some of the new features listed on the roadmap. Congratulations again John, I’m very excited to have you on the core team.

This year at WordCamp New York there will be a whole track dedicated to WordPress MU and BuddyPress. Some of the topics being presented are:

Getting off the Farm:
WPMU Beyond Blog Hosting. We all know that WPMU can be used to host multiple blogs for public or internal signups. But what else can you do? How far can you stretch it? I’ll be showcasing a number of sites that use WPMU in interesting ways. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Writing Plugins for WordPress/MU:
This session will be directed toward plugin developers. We will discuss platform differences & guidelines to keep in mind when writing a plugin for both WordPress & WordPress MU. Speaker: Ron Rennick.

User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems.
Speaker: Casey Bisson.

How-to with MU: Using Multiple Domains, and Building a Member Directory.
A two-part session where we will dig in to two different concepts. First up, we’ll cover how to domain map member blogs, and the difference between multiple sites and multiple domains. The second half will cover how we built a business/member directory and what plugins we used to accomplish this so you can build one too. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Growing Community with BuddyPress:
Speaker: Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Creating Killer Group Extensions in BuddyPress:
In this session learn how to build highly custom feature extensions to BuddyPress groups. Andy will be talking through how you can use the new group extension API to build Twitter stream integration right into your groups. Speaker: Andy Peatling.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub:
In this presentation, I’ll discuss some of the BuddyPress development I’ve done to bridge the WordPress/bbPress/MediaWiki platforms, taking BP beyond its roots as a social networking platform and turning it into a collaboration hub: a space where users can find, friend, and team up with each other (the social networking part BP that does well), work together to produce content (that’s the “collaboration” part), and feed the content back into BP (that’s the “hub” part). Speaker: Boone Gorges.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Setting up BuddyPress (workshop); BuddyPress theme framework.

For a full list of sessions please see the program page.

It should be a fantastic event with space for up to 1000 people. Tickets are selling out fast so if you’re thinking of attending, now is the time to hop in and buy a ticket. It looks like this is going to be the east coast WordCamp to attend. I’ll see you all there!

The votes are in, tallied, and the BuddyPress roadmap is now complete, ready for all to see. Thank you to everyone who gave their input.

The roadmap should give everyone a good idea of what they should expect to see in the next four versions of BuddyPress. You will also see both the status updates and albums components show up within these versions.

I really want to encourage developers to get involved with the project. If you’re a developer and would like to see some of these features (in v1.2+) appear sooner, here’s your chance to help make a big difference.

Group creation is now open on this site, why not pick a feature you’d be interested in working on and create a group for it? By doing this you’ll encourage other BuddyPress developers to join in, discuss the feature and give feedback. I’ll be more than happy to take a look at plugins that add roadmap features and consider them for inclusion in the core of BuddyPress. You may even end up as a core committer.

If you’re interested in development, you should also be spending time in the #buddypress-dev IRC room on Freenode (don’t rely on the Java client though). We frequently have BuddyPress development and plugin discussions in there.

If you have any specific questions, please feel free to DM me or comment on this post, I’ll do my best to answer.

Since the release of BuddyPress 1.0 we’ve been thinking of interesting ways that the community could directly participate in the roadmap for future BuddyPress releases.

We think we’ve found a fun approach, and so we’ve decided to run a bit of an experiment. Over the last week, those who participate in the BuddyPress IRC room on Freenode have had the chance to look over and comment on a list of new BuddyPress features. These features are what we’d like to see make their way into BuddyPress within the next 1-3 versions.

Here’s where you, as a community member come in. We’d like you to play a part in ranking these features, placing the most important features (to you) at the top, and the less important ones at the bottom. Hopefully we can tally enough votes to get a fairly decent overall perspective on what people want first.

These are just features for existing components, the two new components – status updates and albums are already at the top of the roadmap.

I’ve built an interface over the last couple of days that will allow any BuddyPress.org member to log in and start “Roadmap Ranking”. Each of the features are broken down into their respective component and only one component is displayed on the screen at a time. You should rank each component’s features separately. Just drag and drop features in the list.

Head on over to the roadmap ranking page, and cast your vote!

In developing Petomundo!, one of the biggest drawbacks that we faced was in using the default WordPress search. At an early meeting after the Pet Breeds database was created, we would type in Beagle, and in the search results, it would be show down the list as the fourth or fifth post.

Another situation arose in dealing with all of the sub-domain content of the site. We have tons of users creating great blog posts all about the animal world, and there was no way to search the other sites using the default search. So, this needed to be addressed too.

I was a little nervous about the integration with Google Site search as I had used a variety of plugins before that didn’t work the way that I wanted to, so off I went, determined to make it work the way that I wanted.

Here are the steps in a general order.

Google

1. Start off at Google Custom Search Engine and create an account. The reason that we are using Google Custom Search Engine and not Site Search, is that site search you have to pay for, and custom search is ad supported, so it is free. Also, you can set up your adsense account and even make some change for those searches.
2. Fill out all of the forms to get going. The magic comes when you get to the section about sites to search. Theoretically, you could add all of the sub sites, but Google provides a nice wild card setting by adding an asterisk the front or back end of the domain name for sub-folders, or sub-domains. I added these variables:
   • *.petomundo.com/*
   • petomundo.com/store/*
   • petomundo.com/petbreeds/*
   • petomundo.com/members/*

   The first element does a comprehensive search of the whole site, sub-domains, and sub-folders. The second and third provide a refined search that will explain in a moment.

3. Click on Standard (ad supported) Edition and the terms of service, and submit.
4. On the next page, there is a box to try out a query, and I FYI, I have never been able to have it return anything, but it has worked for me on the site.
5. Once you have completed the registration process, click on the control panel button for your site.
6. The basic area can be reviewed. You may wish to have the search engine public, (there are others for code, apple stuff, etc.) When you are done there, if you would like to make money one ads, click over to the make money button in the left column.
7. If you have an Adsense account, simply enter your info. One thing to keep in mind is that you need to make sure you are signed up for AdSense for Search and not just AdSense for Content or Referrals. This needs to be done to make money off the ads that will show up as part your search results.
8. Once that is done, click on the code button to get the code for your site.
9. For me, the goal was to host the results on my site, so I picked that option. If you are looking to make money via adsense, iFrame is the only option.
10. In WordPress, create a new page called search and note the permalink for that page. For Petomundo, it is http://petomundo.com/search-2/.
11. In Google, add the URL for your newly created page into the area where the search results will appear.
12. Now, time to create a few pages in WordPress to handle this new content.

WordPress

1. Let’s start off with the page results template. Take your page.php template in your theme folder and duplicate it, renaming it searchresults.php. At the beginning of the folder add this code to distinguish it as a template page.
2. Now, in the content area of your page, delete the contents of the loop and paste the code from Google into the area where the loop would have been.
3. Now, for the search form, there are few options here. You may want to add it somewhere in your header, perhaps in your sidebar, or elsewhere. With Petomundo, I added it in the header, and also in the sidebar where I had another search box that people where accustomed too. I also added it to the top of the search results page so that if someone wanted to refine there search, they could do it right within the same page as the search results. Like they would with Google.
4. Once the code is place, go back and edit the search page you created back in step 10 of the Google side. If you are running 2.7.* there is a box at the bottom right about page templates. Add the Search Results Page template and you should be set.

A lot of steps, but mostly copy/paste. As I mentioned up in step 2 of the Google part, there are ways to add refinements to your search. I wanted a way for people to search specifically in the Pet Breeds database, and the Petomundo Store, so I added refinements to those search items. With the Member wildcard, you can search just the member profiles for content. Looking for someone with a dog like yours? That is the method there.

Other items of note, some simple CSS will make the results look smashing on your page. I have a content box, with a white background, and then another div inside that that houses the results. That way there is some padding on the sides.

I would like to create a nice little box that houses the search box on the results page, and give it a nice header like I have done other place on the site too… But overall, I am super satisfied with the product. And unlike Google Site Search, I don’t have to pay for this, and you can have the potential to make money too.

This post was written by Jake Spurlock, a member of the BuddyPress developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress blog, please log in and head to the “Write Post” link in the menu bar.

We just began using BuddyPress for a K-12 District in Dearborn, Michigan. As a pilot, Dearborn public schools began using BuddyPress as a student ePortfolio/journal network about three weeks ago.

Our student blogging world is quickly growing – particularly at the high school and middle school level where several teachers were clamoring for a controlled and safe environment for students to blog. Keeping the blog world safe was easy to solve.

We used several plugins to in-effect create an environment where students and staff need to log in in order to participate or view any of the content generated in our blog world. With this same plugin we are also able to allow certain blogs to be “public” and both students and teachers can publish posts to a blog that can be read by all. This feature is useful when the teacher wants to have a classroom website where all parties can participate in sharing and building knowledge. Of course, the teacher is ultimately the one who approves the postings of students before they go “live” much like approving comments.

The response from students has overall been very positive. They enjoy having the freedom to create blogs on their own as well as take ownership of the learning process as they write and reflect on classroom topics. BuddyPress gives students the look and feel of other web tools they use outside of school so they feel at home using it.

As a reference, here are the main plugins that we used:

• WPMU LDAP for authentication (We have over 18,000 students and several thousand staff members who all have access)
• Site-wide Privacy Settings
• Community Blogs for BuddyPress
• Content Monitoring (Finds keywords and alerts site admin of bad content from blogs)

This post was written by Chris Kenniburg, a member of the BuddyPress developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress blog, please log in and head to the “Write Post” link in the menu bar.

When my wife became pregnant, as a first time dad I was over the moon. At that point, your life sort of changes. You start to read baby books and leaflets, meet health advisers and hospital staff. You’re plunged into a world of baby care, lactation, compromise and change. It can be quite daunting at first. I would say it’s quite common to feel a little out of your depth. You certainly start wanting answers to questions that doctors and midwives can’t answer like – can I really be a dad? I can’t even look after myself! Or, how will my life change when the baby is born?

After weeks of contemplation (possibly confusion to some degree), I read a book – a baby diary. What a revelation! The raw truths of mother and fatherhood were reassuring. Many of my questions were answered in that book, the rest were answered by speaking to other mums and dads, reassuring me that these questions I had were normal. It was a weight lifted from my shoulders.

So, what has me becoming a dad got to do with BuddyPress? Well, about 3 months into the pregnancy, after reading this baby diary I had an idea. I was so reassured by the raw truths of parenting that I thought, why not build a web site that lets mums and dads create their own pregnancy diary or baby diaries and chat with each other? Not only will it allow parents to remember and read back on the unforgettable special moments, it will also serve as a really useful tool to reassure others on the quirks of parenting like I was reassured by the book i read.

As I started on my quest to build such a site I already knew I was going to use Wordpress MU. I’ve used it a lot in the past (and practically daily for my job) nothing else comes close. Shortly after setting up the foundations of my site I came across BuddyPress. Initially I was looking for a messaging / chat plugin for WPMU when I stumbled on this wonderful social networking plugin suite. I took one look at the site which was running an early incarnation of BuddyPress and I was hooked – and quite frankly taken aback by what it could offer.

In fact, BuddyPress opened up a whole host of opportunity for my conquest for an online community for parents. It is feature rich, built on an already excellent WP platform and supported, built and maintained by people like me and you. Who wants software supported by the hardcore of coders who speak to you in pseudo bable?

The customization of BuddyPress didn’t stop at the first glance. As soon as I installed it I managed to customize the language to suit my needs, branding my site as a diary site and not a blogging site. I created and plugged in a parent based theme and concentrated heavily on usability.

The administration of BuddyPress also allowed me to completely customize the member profile pages. Not long after the first few releases in alpha and beta, I had forums integrated into groups for my network. Honestly, I could be here all day singing its praises. It opened my eyes and allowed me to take my idea that extra step, a fully fledged social networking platform that’s actually easy to use.

In fact the BP guys have included most of the important features any good social network should have and it’s only a beta! Social networking is the future, it’s even taking over email for some people here in the UK. BuddyPress 1.0 looks to solidify those excellent features with yet more in the pipeline.

I’m very happy with the results, I’m giving something back to the parent community now. Even though it is early days, I’ve already had very positive feedback. I’ve even had the local paper contact us and we have an article going in next week!

Parent Diary.co.uk – with special thanks to BP and WPMU.

This post was written by Ben (oldskoo1), a member of the BuddyPress developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress blog, please log in and head to the “Write Post” link in the menu bar.